1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a layout apparatus, method, and program which lay out, when contents including a cutting line are printed, the contents in an optimal area.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, variable printing for outputting print products that meet customer needs has been performed. A variable printing technique is applied to a technique of printing coupons, whose contents vary with customers, and cutting lines on direct mails. The printing of the cutting lines is featured in that parts of a print product are cut off at cutting positions. Thus, the cutting positions need setting after a layout of the back surface of the print product is adjusted. However, layout processing in consideration of the layout of the back surface has not been performed. Consequently, users have no choice but to lay out print products provided with cutting lines by trial and error. This is inconvenient. In order to eliminate this inconvenience, users have no choice but to adjust layouts of such print products by trial and error and to adjust cutting positions on the front surface of each of the print products and those on the back surface thereof to one another. Accordingly, usability is low.
In order to solve such a problem, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-216182 discusses a technique of sorting record data to be flowed into each layout frame (referred to also as each container) based on a key added to the record data.
However, in a case where two-sided printing is performed on a print product, even when the above sorting technique is applied thereto, a difference can be generated between a cutting position on the front surface thereof and that on the back surface thereof due to a difference in data size between data flowed into a container on the front surface thereof and data flowed into a container on the back surface thereof. When a cutting line is printed, it is necessary in consideration of occurrence of separation of contents to perform layout overflow processing to deal with the separation of contents. However, when layout overflow processing is performed, many contents are concentrated on the same surface by performing layout processing. Thus, contents should be laid out by relatively reducing the size of characters. Accordingly, a problem occurs in which the characters are illegible.